Population Growth: Malthus Rolls Over

Last week, Oxford Computer Science Professor Steven Emmott published an excerpt of his book, Ten Billion, in The Guardian. The tone of the excerpt breaks all of the rules about communication on environmental issues. It uniformly grim and offers no solutions—verboten on two counts if you actually want people to listen, hear the message, and take action. However, the article, and presumably the book, deals head on with the foundation of environmental destruction—population growth—from which so many environmental groups and writers shy away. The article correctly points out that the constraints are not just climate, but water, waste, and concentrated populations combined with contaminated environments that lead to elevated risks of disease.

The Green Revolution caused the Malthusian crisis to go out of fashion. But Malthus was not wrong, but rather too narrow in his analysis; he identified food as a single, inflexible constraint. He didn’t allow for the expanding effects of technology and didn’t consider the ecosystem’s other limits. He should have identified multiple constraint that represent the ecosystem as a whole.

E.O. Wilson coined the term ‘technological prosthesis’ for pesticides, fertilizers, de-salinization, fossil fuels—anything that allows the population to continue to expand beyond what it would without technology. But these prostheses come at the cost of the complexity and resilience of the natural environment. Each prosthetic fix that allows us to go beyond natural carrying capacity also creates a point of weakness at which our built environment can fail.

The Earth has a carrying capacity. Technology and its continual advancement make that capacity hard to pinpoint, but it does not vitiate it all together. If the capacity is met, human population will inevitably be curtailed. The question now is merely whether the curtailment comes about humanely through policy and planning, or painfully, through ecosystem collapse.

Emmott’s article rightly states, “The fact is that they – we – are not being well informed. And that’s part of the problem. We’re not getting the information we need. The scale and the nature of the problem is simply not being communicated to us. And when we are advised to do something, it barely makes a dent in the problem.” But beyond this, Emmott’s prescription become confused. He says that it makes no sense to tell people not to have children, but insists that population control is necessary. He rightly dismisses ‘green lifestyle’ choices as ineffective, but goes on to insist that curtailing consumption is necessary. Ultimately he calls for behavioral change writ large. The prescription is neither new nor actionable. And the final line in the article—that children should be taught to use guns—is bracing, theatrical, but unhelpful.

But Emmott is right about information. Most people, even those concerned about the environment, do not think about the gravity of environmental projects or the consequences of those problems’ trajectories. Mobile technology and the Internet now present unprecedented opportunities for people to have real-time information on the state of not just their own environment, but the health of far flung ecosystems that are being deforested, degraded or acidified. Technology can also allow for people to understand, with a swipe of a barcode, the embedded carbon or water in the products that they are using. But just providing information on the frightening state and trajectories of our environment is well known to merely create panic and causes people to turn away or simply disbelieve.

So what if this mobile information were coupled with information on how our legislators were voting, on critical issues, and how their votes had the power to impact, either positively or negatively, the environmental data that was scrolling across our screens? What if the data tracked our lifestyle choice—including having children—and told us both the immediate and likely future impact of those choices on the environment, ten, fifteen, and twenty years in the future? Now that might just have the chance of bringing about powerful behavioral change.

Sieren Ernst is the co-founder and CEO of the Climate Cost Project, a data and documentary non-profit focused on bringing to light the immediate costs of climate change to American communities. She is also an environmental consultant in climate policy and investment analysis. Sieren has degrees in economics and history from Northwestern University and speaks Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

Suppose that we could snap our fingers and wake up tomorrow morning with a stable world population of 4 billion people. Would this magical transformation represent a definitive and final solution of the impact of human economic activity on the earth’s biosphere? Certainly it would temporarily ease certain short term resource constraints, but in a social system dedicated to maximizing economic growth it is not clear that it would significantly change the amount of carbon from fossil reservoirs that ends up in the earth’s atmosphere. By greatly lowering demand on fossil fuels it would lower costs and hurt the competitive position of nuclear and renewable energy. If every one of those 4 billion people wants to live in a 2500 square foot home, drive a high performance automobile, jet off to exotic vacation spots every year, etc. then a confrontation with the limits of the biosphere to accommodate our economic demands is still very much a serious possibility. It is true of course that limiting the human population allows one to believe in a technological ‘singularity’ which will allow us to chase more dollars forever (where ‘forever’ means comfortably longer than the lifetime of the believer in question) without mussing the hair of the biosphere. But if our ecological understanding has only progressed to the point of understanding that an exponential expansion of human biomass cannot go on forever, then that understanding is still at the level of kindergartener.

0

| - ShareHide Replies ∧

Guest

Daniel LaLiberte

July 13, 2013 15:50

Roger Brown is on the right path to a more correct understanding of the relationship of population and the environment. Many people make the mistake of assuming that because both population and pollution are growing, therefore population growth must be causing pollution to grow as well. But this is a dangerously wrong belief because the population is not equally distributed in how they pollute.It turns out that only a relatively small percentage of the population is contributing most of the pollution, most of the carbon footprint, and is therefore responsible for most of climate change. It is us in the most developed part of the world who also happen to have very stable populations.In contrast, if we look at the poorest half of the population, we see that they are still growing faster than the rest, but it is not because they are having more children; they are actually having fewer children, but fewer are dying as well. But this same group of poor people is only responsible for about 7% of the carbon footprint! So if we mistakenly believe that population growth is the major problem we must address, and if we somehow eliminate the poorest half of the population which is growing fastest, then we will actually be concentrating the remaining 93% of the carbon footprint problem in the richer half of the population, making the problems far worse. This would clearly be the wrong approach.We should focus on the real problem of how to eliminate burning of fossil fuels, and it is critical to understand that eliminating people is the wrong approach. Now as the poorest half of the population begins to develop, and we should feel obligated to assist them however we can, do we expect they will follow in our dirty footprints, building new coal fired plants, when they could be building renewable energy? Must they impoverish the land with agribusiness as we have, or can they develop sustainable permaculture instead? It is absolutely possible and necessary that we figure out how to reduce the average footprint of humanity all the way down to zero, in order to achieve true long-term sustainability. It is simply a matter of producing 100% renewable energy and using some of it to clean up the mess we have created. And then once we have achieved Zero Footprint, it will no longer matter how many people we have, at least up to a much larger number than the current population.

0

| - ShareHide Replies ∧

Guest

DurwoodDugger

July 14, 2013 16:09

Going back to Malthus: What Malthus was observing in food production limitations of his time was the phosphorus replenishment cycle in agriculture – what was essentially what we currently call “organic agriculture.” The advent of phosphorus supplementation and mechanized fossil fuel powered planting and harvesting equipment were not seen in his otherwise correct calculations. However, the phosphorus replenishment cycle in soils (the time it takes the phosphorus to compound into forms biologically available) still haunts the sustainability of the human population. Current phosphate fertilizer as well as all of the NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) fertilizer basis of human food production is absolutely dependent on petroleum and petro chemicals to process phosphate and potassium ores into biologically available fertilizer forms – quickly and on demand – thereby by-passing the natural phosphorus replenishement cycle. The link and impacts on food production between petro chemicals and their respective economies of scale – under peak and declining petroleum production are rarely discussed even though they may well represent the tipping mechanism of our current civilizations collapse.There are numerous scientist warning about the near term (30 years or less) depletion of “useable” (many phosphate sources are contaminated with radioactivity and or other toxic elements – something current USGS [US Geological Survey] phosphate reserve estimates fails to distinguish) surface rock phosphates which have fueled the so called “Green revolution” for the past century. The current rock phosphate depletion numbers don’t include the depletion acceleration affects of new demands like biofuels which are estimated to be up to 4x of food fertilizer demands – that essentially converts critical food resources into fuel. (http://seekingalpha.com/article/1475791-the-bloom-is-off-npk-produced-algae-biofuel-development)Absolutely no biological processes – including ours – are possible without adequate phosphorus available to our metabolism. Clearly the environment and current speciation paradigms – ecosystems – suffer from the blindingly rapid encroachment of the “human bloom” over-populations affects. However, econsystems adapt. As increasing pollution from humans becomes more available, lower trophic species expand their role in consuming them – more algae in the oceans, lakes and rivers. As toxins increase extremophile species fill those niches. However, once the current human economic/food paradigm crashes – the one built on the confluence of cheap fossil fuel energy and cheap rock phosphates implodes – unless their is a economic/technological economically equivalent substitute in hand – our species will collapse back to Malthus’s observed natural phosphorus replenishment cycle limits of about 2 billion.While it’s true that other sources of phosphates exist – such as deep ocean phosphate nodules (which have been known about for 50+ years) the cost (fiscal and physical/energy) differences will not support the current economic food/economic production paradigm. Recyling sewage and other wastes can only offset about 3% of rock phosphate demand. We have become far too comfortable with assumption of a technological fix for all of our problems. Worse, we are clueless in understanding the actual economic costs of those fixes and as well the lead time necessary for them to happen – without resulting mass chaos to our civilization. The only thing that scares me more than our leadership’s and general population’s ignorance of the interrelationships (especially the economics) of critical resource depletion is our total lack of preparation for these inevitable events.